Old World crashing graphics card

[Zloth]

I'm enjoying Old World a lot, but something wierd is happening with my PC. After playing for, oh, around 15 minutes or so, my screen will turn off and the graphics card (?) fan will crank ALL the way up. It will stay that way until I shut off power. It happens at completely random times in the game, they don't seem to be times when anything intersting is happening on screen or in memory - it's mostly when I'm reading popup descriptions. (Being new to the game, I spend about 90% of my time doing that!)

This happened before (maybe 4 months ago?) with X4: Foundations. In that game, though, it would only happen when I started a new game, went to a specific sector, and looked a specific direction. It would happen every time in that one spot. I simply stopped trying to do that and never had an issue again, through hundreds of hours of play.

Now, though, it's making Old Word a major pain. Take a few turns, toast. Take a few more, toast. Needless to say, I'm saving a lot.

I thought it might be the graphics card overheating or the power supply fritzing out or some such. So, I started playing A Plague Tale: Innocence. The GPU got up to the same temp as Old World (80-81C) and stayed there. I was able to play for several hours with no issue. I tried Old World again and crashed again. I've already crashed two more times today.

 

[Brian Boru]

I assume you meet these:

• RECOMMENDED:
  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows® 10 Home 64 Bit
  • Processor: Intel i5-8500 3ghz or similar
  • Memory: 16 GB RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1060 / AMD RX 5500-XT
  • DirectX: Version 12
  • Storage: 14 GB available space

Have you tried some graphics fiddling—reducing or switching off the usual suspects?

Steam OW forum seems to be down. There's a useful looking thread at CivFans, where OW staff hang out and respond:

Overheating extremely quickly

Hello folks, As of a patch or two ago, the game is overheating my computer extremely quickly. Within 60 seconds of starting the game my fans are blasting trying to cool the game down and my entire computer is warm to touch. No other game does this at all, it's exclusively Old World. Is this a...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[Zloth]

I don't think its overheating because Plague Tale gets to the same temperature and stays there with no issue, unless there's some little bit of the card that Old World uses and PT doesn't.

When I'm just looking at tooltip help in Old World, CPU utilization is going to be really small, so the CPU seems dubious, too. <shrug>

Interesting what the devs were saying about refresh rate. That game doesn't even need 60fps, so there's no reason not to give it a try.

 

[Brian Boru]

Steam forum back now, but I haven't seen anything useful there. Maybe post on Mohawk's Discord.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

A fresh reinstall of GPU drivers using DDU in safe mode or rolling back to an older driver version are other basic things to try.

Also possible that a small underclock on the GPU using MSI Afterburner might help. Might be a tiny bit of instability under very specific conditions with the GPU. Should be plenty of guides on how to do that around if needed.

Reducing the frame rate cap might also solve that same issue tho.

 

[Zloth]

It's stable again!

I updated drivers. I would be surprised if there were bug fixes for an established game like Old World, but the update could have written over a corrupted file.

I also stuck the frame rate at 30fps. Being a turn-based 4X game, all it has to do is update the screen as I scroll around and animate some tiles - I don't even notice the difference. I also changed the tooltip help popups so they show up after 0.25 seconds instead of instantly, on the off chance some windows are getting crossed up because they pop up and vanish so fast.

Thanks for the help!